


love is

by notavodkashot



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Character Study, M/M, Pseudo-Stream of consciousness, Relationship Study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-16
Updated: 2017-05-16
Packaged: 2018-11-01 08:42:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10918323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notavodkashot/pseuds/notavodkashot
Summary: His parents don't sayI love you.There is no love, under the Qun.And yet.





	love is

**Author's Note:**

  * For [temporalDecay](https://archiveofourown.org/users/temporalDecay/gifts).



> A very nonsensical quicky to bribe Fi to take me to the movies. Excuse the slight shapelessness of the prose, it didn't quite flow the way I wanted it to.

  


* * *

  


_love is_

  


* * *

  


i. 

His parents don't say _I love you_. 

It's puerile and undignified, he's told, when he's six and brave enough to ask. Marriage is a matter of convenience, something cold and hard and ruthless, that endures all tests, because failure would reflect poorly on those involved. Marriage is wanting for nothing, his Mother tells him, weaving ropes of black pearls into her hair and drawing delicate kohl lines around her eyes. Marriage is giving everything, his Father tells him, walking along the rows and rows of slaves working on rows and rows of wheat. 

Marriage is a pact, they don't say, but he understands well enough, because he's six and a genius and he's grown certain there's nothing he won't ever understand. Marriage is an exchange to create a whole stronger than the sum of its parts. 

His parents don't say _I love you_ , to each other, to themselves, to him. 

His parents walk together, in harmony, powerful and otherworldly, feared and respected and untouchable. 

Dorian hears the slaves whisper the words against each other's mouths, pressed into kisses on their children's heads, and begins to wonder if it was love that damned them, if it is all that is left to them. 

His parents don't say _I love you_. 

Most of the time, he's quite certain he doesn't want them to. 

  


* * *

  


ii. 

There is no love, under the Qun. 

There is friendship and camaraderie, of course. There's passion. There's desire. But there is no such thing as love, under the Qun. 

He learns that love is selfish, vulgar, corruptible. Love makes the Viddathari stumble, tremble, fail. Love is insidious and treacherous, a poison of the very soul itself. It turns the pieces against the whole, and it is anathema to everything Par Vollen stands for. 

There is no love, under the Qun. 

He sees it everywhere, after he leaves Seheron, in merchants and nobles and paupers. He walks among strangers, and comes to realize that the world outside the Qun is ill and dying of that sickness they won't fight. They write songs about it, poetry and stories. They build entire lives around the concept and still manage to be surprised when it all ends in tragedy regardless. 

There is no love, under the Qun. 

Bull looks at the ragtag band of misfits he's assembled into an effective strike force, groomed carefully to be the best they could be, as the Qun dictates – a place for everything and for everyone their place – and wonders if he's not courting disaster in their presence. They're frail and tender in the raw spots where callouses haven't hardened into scars just yet. The most fertile soil for soulrot to encroach itself, and yet, somehow, it doesn't. 

There's no love, under the Qun. 

Most of the time, he's very glad about that. 

  


* * *

  


iii. 

He renounces his parents, and all they represent. 

He tries to, at least. He disdains marriage, in principle and in practice. He rejects callousness even against his own nature – he is not a kind man, he knows this, but spite serves well to teach him the motions, if nothing else. He forfeits all claims to superiority based on anything but tangible proof of his own talent: he is the best, because he is himself, not because he's Altus or a Pavus or his mother's son. 

But deep down, he cannot bring himself to disavow his parents' refusal to love. 

He's seen love, since he's left them: the warmth of a smile without an agenda, the softened eyes of a friend. He's seen what love has done to people, however. The shame and the rage and the punishment without end. 

He renounces his parents, and all they represent. 

He sells his birthright with downright cruel glee. He throws himself into the arms of willing men. He drinks and he riots and he chooses to do what's right, not what's politically correct. 

But deep in his soul, he does not risk himself to try and defy his parents by letting himself love and be loved. 

Early lessons are hard to unlearn. 

  


* * *

  


iv. 

He succumbs in the end, and he does not notice until it is too late. 

It's just as insidious, as poisonous as he always feared it would be. It splinters the part from the whole, makes him stand on the cliff and realize nothing is worth not sounding retreat. So he does, and he feels broken in ways Seheron never did. 

It's a careful, methodical cut, slicing himself from the safety of the Qun and his place amongst the All. He becomes nothing, and yet more. 

But when it's all said and done, when they're back in the safety of the fortress and he's managed to escape the Inquisitor's approving gaze and the profoundly disturbing feelings it evokes, he finds himself unable to give it voice. He's mutilated himself, for their sake. His body, his soul. He's cut up pieces of it and gave each of them one to keep, to hold, to _know_. 

He knows what he's done, he knows the name of the monster devouring him whole. 

But he drinks his share, instead, laughs in all the right places and teases in all the wrong ones, but refuses staunchly to explain himself. To give it name. 

Some things, things he learned well before he was taught how to lie, are too frightening to confront. 

  


* * *

  


v. 

“I just wanted him to love me,” Dorian whispers in the dark, voice muffled against Bull's chest and throat still borderline raw. “All of me. Just me.” 

Bull doesn't say _I understand_ , because he doesn't. 

Bull doesn't argue that Dorian probably really didn't, that his father spared him a fate worse than death, that love is poison and madness and grief. 

Bull says, “I know, Kadan,” and it frightens him to realize Dorian can hear his meaning in the cadence of the words. 

  


* * *

  


vi. 

“I thought you were gone!” Dorian snarls, holding his face in place so Bull can drink up the glare without wasting any. 

There's still a whisper of the Fade licking Bull's skin, making Dorian's fingers tingle and his soul quiver with something far deeper than terror. But still, he is solid beneath his hands, not all twisted in whispers of spirits and demons. And Dorian aches, deeply, somewhere he's always been too afraid to own up to, to even acknowledge. 

“I thought I was gone, myself,” Bull replies, light and airy, like tiny bubbles floating up the surface of the puddle of fear devouring his guts. 

Then Dorian releases him, steps back, as if scalded. Bull opens his mouth, then closes it without a sound as Dorian gestures with his hand. He trembles ever so slightly, with the strain to keep himself together. 

“I might yet survive it, if you leave me now,” Dorian says, dramatic and poignant and painfully earnest, without malice. “So if you're going to leave me, now is the time to do it. Leave me, and we'll be friends, one day. But if you stay...” 

Bull feels the poison burst in his gut, like a boil lanced with a needle. It oozes into his bones, filling them up with foam. He sways in place, under the weight of that offer – command, vow, promise – and the bubbling truth roiling angrily in his veins. 

“There is no love, under the Qun,” he tells Dorian, voice brittle and soft. He reaches out to hold him, when he turns to leave, fleeing the enormity of what Bull is about to say, the foolishness he's going to bestow on them both. He tilts Dorian's face up, meets his eyes and refuses to flinch, because he's faced death with aplomb and he can't do no less now. “But I have renounced the Qun.” 

  


* * *

  


vii. 

“My parents never said _I love you_ ,” Dorian explains, back against the headboard and Bull's head on his lap. He trails his fingers down the shape of his horns, feeling the skin catch along the porous, jagged edges, but he's learned how to touch them without ending up with handfuls of splinters for his trouble. The ludicrous metaphor makes him smile, despite himself. “I didn't want them to say it, I wasn't that selfish. I learned to be selfish later, much later. No, I just wanted them to feel it. They never said it and I never felt it, but I was so sure it was there, nonetheless, buried in deep and I was too daft to realize it.” 

Bull thinks of Dorian and all the tiny, insignificant gestures carefully concealed by his grandiose ones. A soft word here, a light touch there, a timely spell and a well-meant barb. Dorian never gives anyone what they want – most certainly not himself – but he always endeavors to offer what they need. 

“I feel it,” Bull tells him, letting his eye slide close. “Every day.” 

Dorian presses a small, fleeting kiss to the crown of his head. 

“I want to say it, regardless,” he says, mouthing the words against hardened, coarse skin. “Not because they'd hate it, if I did. Not for them. For me. You. Us.” 

Bull opens his eye and reaches a hand to touch Dorian's face. Dorian tilts his head and presses the words into his palm, a whispered truth too loud on its own to be spoken idly. 

  


* * *

  


viii. 

In the end, this is the truth they've learned: Love is poison and terror and madness. Love is kindness and purpose and joy. 

Love is the thread that joins them, weaving a future because and despite their past. 

In the end, their hope is this, that what will survive of them, is love. 


End file.
